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Thursday, February 4, 2016

Flex is having its first Hospitality Suite at Orlando this year. The meeting will occur on Saturday Feb 13 from 7pm to 9pm at the Holiday Inn Express7474 West Colonial Drive Orlando FL which is about 5 miles west of the hamfest sight.

The hamfest site is under my cursor so you can see it's a strait shot to the Suite. I'm definitely planning on making the trip so maybe see you there

Tonight I could finally hear them on 40M. I'll take any band for a new one but my favorite DX band is 40M. I've been listening and listening but they were always far too weak, generally 2 dBm out of the noise. Tonight they were a S unit out of the noise.

Of course since I could hear them every cod knocker on the planet decided to QRM them but I was able to sneak in a QSO

One technique to determine where the DX is listening is to watch skimmer and see the 5NN float by

Monday, February 1, 2016

I called for several hours last night on 80M and 30M, very weak. What a difference a day makes. Tonight on the way to bed I stopped by the shack and they were consistent s5 to s7

So I fired up the amp and shot some lightnin' into the ether

The pileup was about 10khz wide but it was easy to pick out where VP8SGI was listening. He was slowly moving up and down by a little bit about 8.5khz up working about 30 wpm CW at a nice QSO rate. I shot around this area for about 15 minutes trying some tail ending plus or minus a few tens of hz. Proved to be a good strategy, and soon enough he was in my log on 80M.

Here is a shot of the path, from FL to the Blue dot.

Now into the arms of Morpheus with a fine feeling of accomplishment. My Flex 6500, KW and 80M vert delivers once again.

73 W9OY

Update:

One thing I REALLY like is near instant confirmation of success from a DX pedition via clublog. The OP for my QSO was AA7A, excellent experience.